Many theorists across history did not use the signifier 'democracy' in their works.
Nevertheless, they thought, talked, and wrote about democracy.
The above is a slight paraphrasing of Kathleen McCrudden Illert's point in her essay here: https://theloop.ecpr.eu/democracy-by-any-other-name/
It reminds me, as well, of John Dryzek's comment at a University of Canberra seminar in 2016 in which he asked about the synonyms of democracy and what would happen to the research contributions, the (sometimes vast) literatures, about those synonyms if we focus only on the signifier/word/term "democracy".
Since then, and even more now after Kathleen's insight, I have been reading as much as I can into works that don't use the word "democracy" but are, after even a quick analysis, obviously about some type of democracy.
There are parallel discourses afoot, parallel concourses even, in the study of democracy/[insert synonym]/[insert synonym]/etc.,.
See, for example, the literature on "collective decision making". https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22collective+decision+making%22&btnG=
Some publications listed in the Google Scholar link above involve the word "democracy" (or democratic/democratization) but others do not. Yet they tend to be discussing the same phenomenon of 2+ agents (including non-humans) needing or wanting to somehow make a decision together for some reason.
So - what synonyms of democracy do you know of and why, in your esteem, are they worth researching? Perhaps you have a favourite synonym for democracy!
Share with us here! :)
https://theloop.ecpr.eu/democracy-by-any-other-name/
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